Monthly Feature

Raquel Meyers

dadarchy

Inspired by Man Ray’s stencil Long Distance (1926), dadarchy features PETSCII characters brutalizing dada like a concrete poem. “Raw force shaped in text, flat and brutal. It’s dadarchy time!” PETSCII (PET Standard Code of Information Interchange), also known as CBM ASCII, is the character set used in Commodore Business Machines (CBM)’s 8-bit home computers, starting with the PET from 1977.

Raquel Meyers is a Spanish artist based in Sweden who defines her practice as KYBDslöjd (drawing by Type In), a brutalist storytelling about technology and keystrokes where text is used unadorned and roughcast, like concrete. Brutalism has an unfortunate reputation of evoking a raw dystopia and KYBDslöjd evokes an “object of nostalgia”. But nostalgic, retro, obsolete or limited are rhetoric qualities earn by constant repetition. We live in a time where hardware and software become obsolete before most of the users have learned how to use them or disappear into pure functionality. The obedience to standards has made us passive observers and consumers.
Since 2004 Meyers has performed at festivals like Transmediale, Fylkingen, Piksel, Mapping, MFRU, HeK, or Cimatics, at 8bit events like Tokyo Blip Festival and the Playlist exhibition, as well at Liste Art Fair Basel, Xpo Gallery, Click New Media Arts Festival, Alt_Cph, LABoral, FILE and iMAL, among others. In 2016, Meyers has been artist in residence at Le Shadok, Strasbourg, where her first solo show has been organized in collaboration with the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival.